Bring collaboration, learning, and technology together. Identify gaps, pinpoint inefficiencies, and mitigate risk in your workflows. Create custom org charts to fit your business. Gain visibility into your existing technology. Diagram, share, and innovate faster with Lucidchart. Collaborate with remote teams. Lucidchart is a collaborative workspace that brings remote teams together in real time.
Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation. Data flow diagrams allow you to take any flow of information for a process or system and condense it into a coherent, easily understood visual.
Using standardized circles, arrows, and text labels, you can map out entire processes and systems for even the most non-technical employee to understand. With customizable templates, well-stocked DFD shape libraries, and easy-to-use formatting tools, our data flow diagram software gives you the tools you need to create a simple, complex, or even multi-layered DFD online.
Our DFD shape libraries contain standard symbols for both Gane-Sarson and Yourdon-Coad methodologies, allowing you to create clear and consistent data flow diagrams online in minutes. Once your diagram is constructed, use our intuitive formatting tools to ensure that your DFD is easily interpreted, regardless of its complexity. Data flow diagrams are best suited for explaining processes and systems that are difficult to describe using text, making presentation mode essential as you help stakeholders interpret and understand the data flow path of any process.
Use the in-editor presentation mode in our data flow diagram maker to easily present complex technical systems to team members, executives, and non-technical viewers and get everyone on the same page. Our powerful integrations allow you to share your data flow diagram without the hassle of saving and re-sending various versions of your work. Choose a data flow diagram template from our template gallery to get started quickly or start your data flow diagram from scratch by selecting shapes from our DFD shape library.
Add an external entity shape to your canvas from the data flow diagram shape library. This shape signals the beginning of the data flow diagram.
Use the dedicated DFD shapes to designate specific processes in your diagram and assign them a place within the data flow. Click to quickly align your shapes and form a clear, well-spaced flow. Easily add text to lines for additional process referencing, color-code specific shapes or lines, and adjust arrows as needed.
You can sign up to try SmartDraw from this link here. You can create and edit database models without needing to write SQL scripts. Reverse engineering allows you to import existing database structures into the program. You can keep track of database changes with the Synchronize to Database function. After comparing the differences between your model and the database you can use synchronization to update the database. You can download a day free trial. Creating databases through diagrams is the simplest way to create a database.
With tools that can import data from external databases, creating diagrams is easier than ever before. If you need multiple users to work on diagrams then adopting a tool with collaboration capabilities is a must. Define the purpose and boundary of the database Gather all data labels for the system Group the labels by type Open an ERD diagrammer Create an entity for each group Create attributes within each entity and name it with the relevant data label Identify candidate keys in each group Find a unique key — if none exists generate an attribute Normalize the groups so that each attribute in a group is dependent on the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key.
Connect entities together with relationships Add foreign keys to entities where necessary If any many-to-many relationships exist, create an intermediate Entity to break that relationship down.
A relationship is shown in an ERD as a line between two entities. There should be one attribute in one table, called a foreign key, that will contain values that match those in the primary key of another entity.
The relationship line links those two attributes together. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Comparitech uses cookies. More info. Menu Close. We are reader supported and may receive a commission when you make purchases using the links on our site. Once databases exceed human-digestible sizes, using graphical tools to assist in their design becomes essential.
We'll show you the best database diagram tools to give you the edge. Tim Keary Network administration expert. In contrast, ask a software developer to communicate the software architecture of a software system using diagrams and you'll likely get a confused mess of boxes and lines As an industry, we do have the Unified Modeling Language UML , ArchiMate and SysML, but asking whether these provide an effective way to communicate software architecture is often irrelevant because many teams have already thrown them out in favour of much simpler "boxes and lines" diagrams.
Abandoning these modelling languages is one thing but, perhaps in the race for agility, many software development teams have lost the ability to communicate visually. The C4 model was created as a way to help software development teams describe and communicate software architecture, both during up-front design sessions and when retrospectively documenting an existing codebase. It's a way to create maps of your code, at various levels of detail, in the same way you would use something like Google Maps to zoom in and out of an area you are interested in.
Like source code, Google Street View provides a very low-level and accurate view of a location. Navigating an unfamiliar environment becomes easier if you zoom out though. Zooming out further will provide additional context you might not have been aware of. Different levels of zoom allow you to tell different stories to different audiences. Although primarily aimed at software architects and developers, the C4 model provides a way for software development teams to efficiently and effectively communicate their software architecture, at different levels of detail, telling different stories to different types of audience, when doing up front design or retrospectively documenting an existing codebase.
Level 1: A System Context diagram provides a starting point, showing how the software system in scope fits into the world around it. Level 2: A Container diagram zooms into the software system in scope, showing the high-level technical building blocks.
Level 3: A Component diagram zooms into an individual container, showing the components inside it. Level 4: A code e. UML class diagram can be used to zoom into an individual component, showing how that component is implemented. The C4 model is an "abstraction-first" approach to diagramming software architecture, based upon abstractions that reflect how software architects and developers think about and build software. The small set of abstractions and diagram types makes the C4 model easy to learn and use.
Please note that you don't need to use all 4 levels of diagram; only those that add value - the System Context and Container diagrams are sufficient for many software development teams. In order to create these maps of your code, we first need a common set of abstractions to create a ubiquitous language that we can use to describe the static structure of a software system.
The C4 model considers the static structures of a software system in terms of containers , components and code. And people use the software systems that we build. A software system is made up of one or more containers web applications, mobile apps, desktop applications, databases, file systems, etc , each of which contains one or more components , which in turn are implemented by one or more code elements e.
A person represents one of the human users of your software system e. A software system is the highest level of abstraction and describes something that delivers value to its users, whether they are human or not. This includes the software system you are modelling, and the other software systems upon which your software system depends or vice versa.
In many cases, a software system is "owned by" a single software development team. Not Docker! In the C4 model, a container represents an application or a data store. A container is something that needs to be running in order for the overall software system to work. In real terms, a container is something like:.
A container is essentially a context or boundary inside which some code is executed or some data is stored. Because of this, communication between containers typically takes the form of an inter-process communication.
The word "component" is a hugely overloaded term in the software development industry, but in this context a component is a grouping of related functionality encapsulated behind a well-defined interface. If you're using a language like Java or C , the simplest way to think of a component is that it's a collection of implementation classes behind an interface. Aspects such as how those components are packaged e.
An important point to note here is that all components inside a container typically execute in the same process space. In the C4 model, components are not separately deployable units. Visualising this hierarchy of abstractions is then done by creating a collection of Context , Container , Component and optionally Code e.
UML class diagrams. This is where the C4 model gets its name from. See example diagram, key, and narrative. A System Context diagram is a good starting point for diagramming and documenting a software system, allowing you to step back and see the big picture. Draw a diagram showing your system as a box in the centre, surrounded by its users and the other systems that it interacts with.
Detail isn't important here as this is your zoomed out view showing a big picture of the system landscape. The focus should be on people actors, roles, personas, etc and software systems rather than technologies, protocols and other low-level details.
It's the sort of diagram that you could show to non-technical people. Primary elements : The software system in scope. Supporting elements : People e. Intended audience : Everybody, both technical and non-technical people, inside and outside of the software development team. Once you understand how your system fits in to the overall IT environment, a really useful next step is to zoom-in to the system boundary with a Container diagram. A "container" is something like a server-side web application, single-page application, desktop application, mobile app, database schema, file system, etc.
The Container diagram shows the high-level shape of the software architecture and how responsibilities are distributed across it. It also shows the major technology choices and how the containers communicate with one another. Primary elements : Containers within the software system in scope. Supporting elements : People and software systems directly connected to the containers. Notes : This diagram says nothing about deployment scenarios, clustering, replication, failover, etc.
Next you can zoom in and decompose each container further to identify the major structural building blocks and their interactions. Primary elements : Components within the container in scope.
Supporting elements : Containers within the software system in scope plus people and software systems directly connected to the components. Intended audience : Software architects and developers.
Recommended for most teams : No, only create component diagrams if you feel they add value, and consider automating their creation for long-lived documentation. See example diagram and narrative. Finally, you can zoom in to each component to show how it is implemented as code; using UML class diagrams, entity relationship diagrams or similar.
This is an optional level of detail and is often available on-demand from tooling such as IDEs. Ideally this diagram would be automatically generated using tooling e. This level of detail is not recommended for anything but the most important or complex components. Primary elements : Code elements e. Recommended for most teams : No, for long-lived documentation, most IDEs can generate this level of detail on demand.
Once you have a good understanding of the static structure, you can supplement the C4 diagrams to show other aspects. The C4 model provides a static view of a single software system but, in the real-world, software systems never live in isolation. For this reason, and particularly if you are responsible for a collection of software systems, it's often useful to understand how all of these software systems fit together within the bounds of an enterprise. To do this, simply add another diagram that sits "on top" of the C4 diagrams, to show the system landscape from an IT perspective.
Essentially this is a high-level map of the software systems at the enterprise level, with a C4 drill-down for each software system of interest. From a practical perspective, a system landscape diagram is really just a system context diagram without a specific focus on a particular software system.
Primary elements : People and software systems related to the enterprise in scope. Intended audience : Technical and non-technical people, inside and outside of the software development team.
A dynamic diagram can be useful when you want to show how elements in a static model collaborate at runtime to implement a user story, use case, feature, etc. It is similar to a UML sequence diagram although it allows a free-form arrangement of diagram elements with numbered interactions to indicate ordering.
Scope : An enterprise, software system or container. Primary and supporting elements : Depends on the diagram scope; enterprise see System Landscape diagram , software system see System Context or Container diagrams , container see Component diagram. This deployment diagram is based upon a UML deployment diagram , although simplified slightly to show the mapping between containers and deployment nodes. A deployment node is something like physical infrastructure e. IaaS, PaaS, a virtual machine , containerised infrastructure e.
Deployment nodes can be nested. Some processes are small and do not require connectors while some need various types of connectors to handle many conditions. With the advent of new technologies in the field of flow chart creation, it has become an easy task. I would always suggest you to use program structure to ease the process of understanding the system and its flow. The following are some program flowchart templates in Edraw Flowchart Software. A graphic representation of an algorithm, often used in the design phase of programming to work out the logical flow of a program.
EdrawMax is an advanced all-in-one diagramming tool for creating professional flowcharts, org charts, mind maps, network diagrams, UML diagrams, floor plans, electrical diagrams, science illustrations, and more.
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